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How Hot is the Stock Market Right Now? ByteDance Employee Makes $30 Million from Stock Trading and Just Quit

涨声BeatZ

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Stock Trading Big Brother Even Gave Up His Own Byte Options

Author: Jia Liu, Rising Beat

The post "ByteDance Employee Makes $30 Million from Stock Trading" went viral.

According to online sources, the protagonist is rumored to be the admin of an early ByteDance internal stock investment group.

Rumors have it that he achieved financial freedom through investing, leaving behind two sentences on the last day: Working can only sustain the current life, only investment can lead to a better life; the probability of achieving financial freedom through investment is much higher than making it to a 4-1 ratio at ByteDance.

The story of financial freedom is always so inspiring.

It is said that some ByteDance friends couldn't resist on the spot, taking out loans on the spot to go all-in on stocks.

The narrative of the past tech giants was simple. Join a high-growth company, receive a high cash income, wait for stock options to appreciate, achieve wealth transformation through promotion and company IPO. ByteDance itself is one of the most successful examples of this narrative. Business Insider reported last year that ByteDance valued itself at around $330 billion in an employee buyback, with Fidelity providing a higher valuation; subsequent secondary transactions pushed ByteDance's implied valuation to around $480 billion. In other words, from the time ByteDance employees joined, what they encountered was not just "work," but valuation, options, buybacks, liquidity, and asset revaluation.

So the stock trading big brother didn't even want ByteDance's stock options. He looked down on them.

This is not ByteDance's first urban legend, either.

There was already a "Beijing Trader" last year whose ID was also from ByteDance, known in the stock community as the "North God." In multiple financial articles and reposts, the common narrative about him is: entered the market in 2007, initially went through the trial and error of ordinary retail investors, and later used about $80,000 in capital to achieve a scale of tens of millions. An article republished on NetEase summed up his journey as "turned $80,000 into $50 million."

The current stock market is truly at a historic level, not just in the U.S., but globally. In the A-share market, the daily trading volume of the Shanghai and Shenzhen stock exchanges exceeding ¥3 trillion has become the norm, something unimaginable in the previous bull market. Korean stocks have skyrocketed even more, with Koreans pulling out their pension and insurance funds, going all-in on Hynix.

At the end of November 2022, ChatGPT was launched. From that moment on, Wall Street has been waiting for the AI bubble to burst.

However, three and a half years have passed, and this round of the market not only has not ended but is accelerating. NVIDIA, starting from a $500 billion market cap in early 2023, has risen to over $5 trillion, going through events like the DeepSeek impact, US-Iran conflict, and inflation backlash. After each pullback, it has been driven to new highs by stronger financial reports and larger capital expenditures. By 2025, AI-related stocks contributed to approximately 80% of the full-year gain in the S&P 500.

By the first half of 2026, the global stock market was still in the midst of a frenzy of gains.

After all, the prevailing sentiment of this generation is: work is becoming more like a side gig, while stock market investment is the main job.